Update v6.2.1 pushed out to Kindle Fire – it installs silently and breaks root with SuperOneClick

The Amazon Kindle Fire gets listed in the same column as the rest of the Android tablets, but it’s worth remembering that it’s a highly customized version of Android and works differently than the rest. Take the silent auto-updates for example – the Fire will install the latest available firmware version 6.2.1 without asking, which will break root and make the tablet immune to SuperOneClick rooting.

The update does bring several goodies, the most valuable of which is probably the ability to remove items from the homescreen carousel. The update also improves scrolling performance and adds the option to lock Wi-Fi access with a password (as a sort of child lock).

As for geeks who want to keep their root, make sure you don’t connect to a Wi-Fi network or the Kindle Fire will fetch and install the update in the background.

Several potential fixes have been offered by the XDA-Developers forum posters – moving to CyanogenMod 7, removing (or simply renaming) OTASilentInstall.apk and restarting, modifying the hosts file to point Amazon’s update servers to localhost.

On a related note, the Amazon Kindle Fire seems to be an increasingly popular web browsing device as recent ad impressions study by Millennial Media (the largest independent mobile ad network) suggests. The number of impressions has been growing by 19% a day since the Fire’s launch.

While ad impressions don’t directly relate to the number of actual users of the tablet, the sheer increase in the number of impressions (even bigger than the iPad’s back when it was launched) shows the Kindle Fire is on a roll.